Techniques to support Web Service selection and consumption with QoS characteristics

This work proposes a Web Service (WS) discovery model in which the functional and nonfunctional requirements are taken into account during service discovery. The proposed infrastructure includes a set of services and tools to support an integrated WS discovery and selection solution. A mechanism is introduced that supports three different functional policies. It is able to take advantage of quality information located into a Web Service description language description file that might be located in a proprietary universal description, discovery and integration registry server or in an independent URL. Moreover, it implements a database supported WS intermediary (Broker) that it is also possible to store quality of service (QoS) information for WSs. A selection module is also presented that delivers the WS that maximizes the value of QoS characteristics among others with the same functionality. An experimental prototype is presented and evaluated in the scenario of air ticket issuing WS selection. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.